Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Professor Axworthy, thank you for being here.
We have a disease in Parliament called “studyitis” that I'm sure you know very well. It's rampant. Rather than taking a problem and actually doing a study and implementing solutions, we study things to death. But our biggest failure—not peculiar to our institution, as you know—is our failure to implement the recommendations in studies, and you quite eloquently drew attention to the vast number of studies and groups that exist.
We also heard from the last group that democracy can't really have traction unless the GDP goes to above $6,000 per person per year. The problem in the countries we're trying to address is that the economic potential of a country is being thwarted by leaders who engage in behaviours that are egregious, frequently elected. So none of these leaders are people of the calibre of Seretse Ian Khama of Botswana, who even before they found diamonds decided quite intelligently to be a very strong leader and implement and utilize the resources of the country for the benefit of his people.
In your view, what can we and should we do to address leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has destroyed an otherwise very strong country and turned it into a basket case, and negatively affected the future of an entire generation of Zimbabweans?
My second question: We have the IDRC. We have Human Rights and Democracy. We have the Parliamentary Centre. We have the Canada Corps. Why do we need another institution, when we already have all of those institutions? Isn't the biggest problem a failure to implement recommendations that are coming from the very intelligent people in our country, that we're simply not implementing what should be implemented?